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American Fuging Tunes in The Sacred Harp

Cronin, Molly K.
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1267719283

Abstract Details

2010, M.M., University of Cincinnati, College-Conservatory of Music : Music History.
Although originally from Great Britain, the fuging tune gained such popularity in eighteenth-century America that scholars now associate it with the First New England School of composers. Despite this form’s popularity, Lowell Mason discouraged its use, along with the salient characteristics of eighteenth-century American composition, during his nineteenth-century better music movement. Mason succeeded in cutting off this distinctly American style in New England urban centers and Midwestern cities. However, the eighteenth-century singing school practice and compositional style continued in rural areas and eventually took root in the South. The singing school practice in the nineteenth-century Southern tradition continued using the eighteenth-century New England repertory and adapted the practice of singing shape-notes as a pedagogical tool. Singers participated in small regional singings and large-scale conventions in which they sang from these shape-note tunebooks singing first the syllables, then the text to the songs. In 1844, Benjamin Franklin White published The Sacred Harp in Georgia. Editors revised the songbook numerous times updating the collection according to the popularity of individual numbers and including songs composed by current participants in the singing tradition. The editors of the most recent revision in 1991 retained songs dating from the eighteenth century in addition to ones composed by participants throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As a result, The Sacred Harp remains an important source for eighteenth-century hymnody in general and the fuging tune in particular, as singers continue to compose fuging tunes in this tradition. This study includes analyses of fuging tunes from the most significant revisions of The Sacred Harp in order to discern different stylistic trends throughout the significant editions of The Sacred Harp. Chapter 1 takes New England fuging tunes as a starting point in order to establish the form and style of the genre, and for comparison with subsequent tunes. The fuging tunes analyzed in Chapter 1 have survived periodic revisions of The Sacred Harp, and editors continued to publish these eighteenth-century pieces alongside later compositions. The nineteenth-century fuging tunes examined in Chapter 2 are associated with the original compiler/composer of The Sacred Harp, Benjamin Franklin White. Composers in the second half of the nineteenth century drew on other musical sources, such as folk hymns, which are also found in Southern tunebooks. These fuging tunes represent the first examples by Southern composers. Chapter 3 examines popular fuging tunes from the early twentieth century that demonstrate the lasting influence of eighteenth-century fuging tunes, folk hymns, and even the first generation of Southern composers from the 1840s. The most recent revision of The Sacred Harp in 1991, considered in Chapter 4, illustrates how the Sacred Harp singing practice has been disseminated to the Northeast and Midwest. For the first time in its publication The Sacred Harp contained music composed by participants from regions outside the South. These examples demonstrate that this dissemination process did not result in a new style of fuging tune. Composers who contributed to the 1991 edition continued to draw on all the past styles to create a heterogeneous repertoire of fuging tunes. Although the fuging tune exemplifies eighteenth-century American hymnody, this genre enjoys a long compositional history through the Sacred Harp tradition, and continues to be composed and performed by an established community of singers.
bruce mcclung, PhD (Committee Chair)
Melinda Boyd, PhD (Committee Member)
Edward Nowacki, PhD (Committee Member)
92 p.
Music
sacred harp; fuging tune; american music

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Cronin, M. K. (2010). American Fuging Tunes in The Sacred Harp [Master's thesis, University of Cincinnati]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1267719283

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Cronin, Molly. American Fuging Tunes in The Sacred Harp. 2010. University of Cincinnati, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1267719283.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Cronin, Molly. "American Fuging Tunes in The Sacred Harp." Master's thesis, University of Cincinnati, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1267719283

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

ucin1267719283
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© 2010, some rights reserved.Creative Commons License American Fuging Tunes in The Sacred Harp by Molly K. Cronin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at etd.ohiolink.edu.
This open access ETD is published by University of Cincinnati and OhioLINK.